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by viceindustrious



Category: The Man in the High Castle (TV)
Genre: Gun Kink, M/M, Nazis, Uniform Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-28
Updated: 2017-03-28
Packaged: 2018-10-12 07:14:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10485282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viceindustrious/pseuds/viceindustrious
Summary: Obergruppenführer Smith receives a tape concerning Joe Blake





	

**Author's Note:**

> All praise should rest with ClementineStarling. The blame, I'll take myself.

The tape arrives at his desk in a manilla envelope, his name printed in the anonymous block capitals of a typewriter on both sides, an 8mm reel with just two words scrawled in a careless hand across the cannister: _Ostuf Blake_.

John turns it over, once, twice. There's nothing else to see. He taps his finger against the slate grey tin and it makes a hollow, metal sound. He is vaguely away of Major Klemm's stiff, diligent figure hovering at the edge of his vision. Lawrence expects to be reprimanded, John knows, since he has no explanation for the envelope, no intelligence on its courier. It should be an embarrassment but somehow John doubts Lawrence is at fault here.

Of course he remembers Juliana Crain's words, quiet and earnest. What did you see Juliana? _Members of the resistance being executed by Nazis, one of them was Joe Blake_. Obvious from the way she had looked at him that Joe had been the one with his finger on the trigger.

He doesn't trust it, not the print on the envelope which is clearly too uniform to track down to any particular machine (though he'll send it off for analysis regardless), nor the incongruous banality of the plain little envelope. The handwriting on the can itself unsettles him. There's a tugging familiarity to the slope of the letters that he can't pin down.

The thing is harmless in a practical sense. It's not a bomb, there's nothing suspicious about it outside of its mere existence, but he knows that can be enough. He's seen good men, strong men, rocked by a pamphlet, by a remark doled out here or there over the course of a month. They were fools, but the most foolish thing would be to assume he is invulnerable. If someone sent this to his desk with ill intentions then why watch it all all? Perhaps the smartest thing to do would be to lock it away somewhere safe, sight unseen. Hell, maybe even burn it.

He opens the can and considers the glossy, black-brown spool of tape coiled within. He closes it again, slips it back into the envelope and then places the envelope in his desk.

He taps his fingers on his desk. His nails could use with cutting. Rudolph once told him that tapping your nails promoted growth but that sounded like an old wives' tale to him. That was when there had been so much work to do, who could blame him that he hadn't time to take care of his nails. _It's genetic,_ Rudolph had said, _look how you've been shedding all over the showers. Your nails grow quick, your beard grows quick, you're clogging up the drain_.

It wasn't their job to clean the showers.

He should leave the tape in his desk. He should send it on to Berlin.

Whoever sent it thought they were smart. To send something like this? Addressed to him? Surely they must have thought they were five steps ahead of the game. The presence of the tape in his desk feels like it's radiating a bright light. They expected him to watch it. In watching it they must think he would play into their game. The coward's way out would be to not watch it at all.

He opens the drawer and puts the tape into his bag.

 

He waits until Helen has gone up to bed, patient kiss pressed against his cheek and an admonishment to _please, get some rest tonight, John_ \- before ferreting out the box for their little, putty coloured Eumig projector from beneath the stairs. He sets it up on the desk in his study, unfolds the unwieldy brass stand to hold the screen, checks the bulb. Someone has left a tape in the box from the last time it was used, _Thomas' 12th Birthday!_ Helen's penmanship cheerfully proclaims. He lays it next to the projector, then takes the envelope from his bag and sets the Blake tape beside it. Kodachrome colour film, they look almost identical.

The tape is simple to thread onto the take-up sprocket, little perforations snapped up readily by the sprocket teeth, back under the guide rolls; he works mechanically, like it's a home movie. There is no such thing as Obersturmführer Blake, it could just be like his little girls dressed up in witches hats on Halloween. John finishes fixing the film to the spool on the rear arm and then, without needing to think about it, goes to the cabinet and pours two fingers of rye into a squat tumbler.

He leans back against the edge of his desk, flips the switch to turn the lamp off and then the one to turn the projector on. A picture flickers to life on the screen before him, a stuttering grey image of a blank sky or a bare wall, the blur of the camera swinging up or down. He nudges a slider on the side of the machine until the running speed evens out to play smooth, just as Joe Blake's profile fills the screen.

The camera is trained in close, handheld, not quite steady and the sleek brim of the SS officer's cap Joe is wearing keeps falling in and out of frame. It zooms with a lurch on one of Joe's eyes, lashes fluttering as he blinks, four times fast, one after another, his gaze fixed forward. A drop of sweat rolls down his temple, past the edge of his eyebrow. The camera follows, then swerves to his mouth, to the slight partition of his lips. It cleaves near and intimate, panning down his throat and the starched, brilliant white of his collar, lingering here and there; the silver insignia stitched at his lapels, the leather belt buckled tight around the trim neatness of his waist, the stark red band about his left arm. He looks like he was born to the uniform.

There's a sudden cut to a wider shot of the room, a nondescript box of concrete with narrow, letter box windows up near the ceiling. Off cuts of rebar make for prison bars, though a grown man would never be able to fit himself through those miserly slots anyway. John recognizes it for what it is. He's grown accustomed to these useful, bare rooms. He thinks Joe is almost certainly kneeling over the grate in the centre that makes them easy to hose down. Joe's hands are clasped behind him and there is someone standing, out of shot, holding a pistol to the nape of his neck.

The shot narrows in one the barrel of the gun as the muzzle moves slowly, stuttering up the back of Joe's head, driving a line through the close, blond crop of his hair. John can see how hard the gun is pushing against Joe's skull, can imagine the soft, scouring sound of it. The muscles in Joe's jaw twitch, there's a flash of teeth as he grimaces.

Maybe this is the only type of thing these tapes ever show – death, extermination, defeat. John almost reaches for the power switch, what good is it going to do to see Joe's brains painting the floor? What's there to learn? Someone wanted him to see this, as what? A warning? A threat? His mouth narrows, lips pressed together tight. Too many questions to turn it off before watching the whole thing through.

The camera zooms out, tracking right at the same time to place both figures in the room. John looks at the man holding the gun to Joe's head. He turns the projector off.

Upstairs, he imagines, Helen is sleeping sweetly. He glances toward the ceiling, wiping his palms on the front of his trousers, pressing the back of his hand against his mouth for a moment. He stands and paces the room back and forth a few steps, then picks up his glass and takes a small, measured sip. The press of the tumbler against his palm makes him think of the butt of a gun. The film sits silent in the projector. He already knew the things on these tapes were impossible, but it's different watching himself up there. He pours himself another drink but then thinks better of it and reaches for a cigarette instead, walks over and locks the study door, then switches the projector back on.

The John Smith on screen brings the muzzle of the pistol up until it reaches the brim of Joe's hat and then knocks it off onto the floor with a jerk of his wrist. The camera narrows in on it where it falls, next to a large, dark stain, still glistening tacky wet, black-brown like the film tape itself and Joe's fingers curl in a curtailed impulse to reach for it. The shot stays low, following John's boots as he steps round in front of Joe, then veers up.

The barrel of the pistol taps against the strong, proud jut of Joe's jaw, turned up to face the man whose weapon, John knows, is not the sister of his own, but is his own, somehow. Just as the man who holds it is more than a mere a doppelgänger of himself. The barrel pushes Joe's head one way, then the other and each time Joe turns his cheek and offers no resistance and his eyes stay fixed up.

John doesn't want to follow Joe's eyeline. Juliana had shown him a scientific overexposure of death, the bright plume of the end of things but all of that seems like a cartoon when it comes to watching himself and the prosaic weave of the cloth at his wrist.

It's a dark black line and the camera focuses in on that, follows his forearm up to his elbow and then up to his shoulder, to his collar and then up to the dark curve of his smile and the darker contemplation of his gaze. The slender muzzle of the pistol traces the orbit of Joe's left eye, slides down his cheekbone and Joe turns into it, just a little, tilting his head to nuzzle back against the hard, black steel.

Alone, in his study, the regulated whir of the projector seems to fade away or fall into confusion with the rushing of his heartbeat in his ears. John crushes the filter of his cigarette, gripping the edge of the desk. On screen he is holding the gun-barrel flat and steady against Joe's skin and Joe is rubbing his cheek against it, blatant now, the pout of his bottom lip dragged between his teeth, eyebrows furrowed not in pain but want. John tells him something, easy enough to read even in this silent movie, two words. Joe turns his face to kiss along the barrel of the gun, smearing his damp, pink lips along its length, unblinking.

The camera angles on a streak of grease, gun oil and old powder, smeared like a duelling scar across the plane of Joe's cheek. Is there some tape out there where Joe is scarred for real, he wonders, maybe a world without a Joe Blake but a Josef Heusmann instead, but then he wonders no more because the muzzle of the gun is pushing into Joe's mouth, past his teeth and Joe's tongue is lapping at the underside of the barrel as it goes, deeper, deeper until John is watching him struggle not to gag, his Adam's apple bobbing in desperate little convulsions.

The barrel slides out, slick and gleaming wet, slides _almost_ all the way free then pushes back inside, angled now into the inside of Joe's cheek so John can see the obscene shape of it as it fucks his mouth. Joe spreads his knees to lower himself, drops his head back to make a more accommodating line of his throat and looks up at John as he sucks, his hands still clasped behind his back with all the discipline of a good soldier.

In the study, John presses the heel of his palm hard against his cock lying throbbing and heavy with blood against his thigh, grinding against it for one brief moment, grimacing at the ache. How badly he wants to pull himself free and stroke to the rhythm of the gun slipping back and forth past the swollen O of Joe's lips. The front sight is going to flay them bloody soon, he thinks and almost groans.

The gun pulls free silently on screen but John can still hear it, the wet little pop it would make. The camera pans over Joe, top to bottom, from the fucked open rawness of his mouth and the heave of his chest as he pants, there on his knees in his pristine uniform, to the mirror black toe of John's boot that steps with purpose between his thighs. He has his hands on Joe, pistol still clutched in one and pressing like a vice at the base of Joe's skull, his other hand scraping through the combed back, precision of Joe's hair, tugging his face forward into his crotch.

Absolutely bare and naked, caught there on film; the shameless need in the roll of Joe's hips, rutting against his boot with filthy abandon, rubbing his face against the front of John's trousers, it seems more real than the dim and hazy room around him, his forgotten cigarette sending smoke to drift like mist caught in the beam of the projector's lamp. His jaw is tight enough to make his temples throb, the backs of his ears burning as he watches himself unfasten his trousers and pull out his cock, so hard and angry looking pushing up against Joe's pretty face.

Joe's hands ball into fists as John chokes him with his cock, lodged deep in his throat, but his hips still buck, rubbing himself off on the leather pillar of John's calf and when John pulls out, his cock dripping, frothed with spit, his mouth hangs open searching after it. John's fist is taut in Joe's hair, sliding himself across Joe's face, saliva and precome painting glossy trails across Joe's forehead, cheeks, his eyelashes. He plunges back inside Joe's throat, reaching as deep as he he can push, his hips angled so it slides straight down, making Joe's eyes roll back white and and his hands begin to slap against the concrete floor and-

The movie cuts off, the end of the tape fluttering onto the take-up sprocket.

John stares at the blank white screen for a moment, the sight almost like a hallucination – he feels drunk enough, he feels dizzy and on edge and like he's back in one of those rooms where they told him, what you're doing here is necessary, anything you do here is necessary, the worst things you can do are necessary. In these grey little rooms where people come undone. Joe had been smiling when the gun was pressed to his face.

John presses the button that will rewind the film to play again.


End file.
